Is Foxconn a fantasy? The high cost of bringing manufacturing jobs to Wisconsin

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Prachatai/Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Last week, President Trump, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and
Foxconn – an electronics manufacturing company owned by a wealthy Taiwanese
tycoon – announced
plans to build a factory in the United States to produce LCD screens. Trump
lauded this as a victory in his stated quest to bring manufacturing jobs to the
United States. But the reality may be something different.

If the name Foxconn rings a bell, you may be remembering the
epidemic of suicides that horrified the world at the so-called Foxconn City
industrial park in Shenzhen, China. In 2010, 18 employees attempted suicide,
and 14 died as a result of those attempts. Many reports attribute this rash of
suicides – which continued through 2016 – to the harsh
working conditions workers endured in the factories, with forced overtime
and unrealistic production quotas.

Foxconn’s track record in the United States doesn’t
necessarily inspire confidence. In 2013, Foxconn publicly announced they
intended to invest $30 million in a Pennsylvania factory, creating 500 jobs.
Today, a gravel pile sits on the site where the factory was to be built, and
Foxconn has gone silent on the issue. In fact, they’ve made similar
empty promises in India, Vietnam, Brazil and Indonesia.

Foxconn employs 1.2 million workers worldwide, 500,000 of
which are at the infamous Shenzhen factory complex. At its grandest vision, the
Wisconsin plant would make up less than one tenth of one per cent of Foxconn’s
global workforce. The 3,000 jobs they are initially promising represent such a
minor number, they would ‘be considered a “rounding
error” in China’, according to Christopher Balding, a professor of
economics at Peking University. It doesn’t take much political acumen to guess
the company’s true motivation: currying favor with a major importer of their Asian-produced
goods by helping the US president score a win on his manufacturing promises.

This announcement was set against the backdrop of the Senate
vote on whether to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, popularly known
as Obamacare. The repeal of this plan would not only have stranded
32 million people without health insurance, it would have drastically cut
funding to Medicaid, hospitals, retirement homes, and other health facilities.
These cuts would translate into job losses – a predicted one
out of every 20 healthcare jobs could disappear by the year 2026. Alas, for
Trump, these jobs don’t seem to count; only jobs that feed into his apparent
fixation on showing he can broker ‘deals’ that will deliver on his promise to reinvigorate
the manufacturing sector.

It’s also worth asking what kind of jobs the Foxconn deal
will create. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s entire political career has been
framed by his battle against organised labor. With funding from the Koch
Brothers and other deep-pocketed out-of-state donors, he’s waged an unceasing
battle against public sector unions, including teachers and other civil
servants. He also helped make Wisconsin a ‘right to work’ state, which will
make it much more difficult for Foxconn’s employees to join a union if they decide
to. Under Walker’s watch, union
membership has plummeted faster than in any other state in the country.

Let’s be clear: the media splash created by the (potential)
Foxconn investment is understandable, given the very real need to find way to
support well-paying, family sustaining jobs in the US manufacturing sector. But
given the track record of company and politicians involved, the Wisconsin
legislature should take a long, hard look at whether the deal on the table
makes economic sense for taxpayers and workers. Trump, Walker, and Foxconn may have to turn over a new leaf if they want
to prove that they are genuinely interested in creating good, family-sustaining
jobs, as opposed to simply garnering attention to further their electoral
agenda.

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